The advent of high-speed communications has seen greater transport of data. One advantage of high speed data is that data may be stored in a central, secure location and provided on demand to remote or local physical machines. Applications have been developed that provision a virtual hard disk on a secure server that allow a user to interact with a hard disk in a manner that emulates the operating system of a typical physical machine.
Typically, when a physical machine is implemented as a virtual machine, the entire contents of the physical machine are copied first. If a user desires to make configuration changes, these must be done after the conversion of the physical machine to the virtual machine. This can be particularly cumbersome where multiple physical machines are to be implemented as virtual machines.
Many physical machines fail to meet virtualization requirements because they either fail to meet security requirements or the pre-configuration cost is higher than creating a new virtual machine. For example, the source machine could have excessive temporary data that would increase conversion time and network bandwidth utilization.
What is required, is a system, method and computer readable medium that provides greater flexibility and efficiency for converting physical machine systems to virtual machines.